The body of Katoucha Niane, one of the first African models to reach international stardom, and a vocal opponent of genital mutilation, was found today in the Seine. The 47 year old Guinean-born mother of three, known as Katoucha, had been missing since she left a party on February. There is no evidence of foul play, and the police suspect she may have slipped and drowned on the way to the house boat on the Seine she lived in when she stayed in Paris.

The ritual genital mutilation she suffered would change Katoucha’s life forever. As she explains in her autobiography, Katoucha, In My Flesh, her life went from one of complete happiness: “I grew up surrounded by hibiscus and ylang-ylang flowers,” to trauma:

One day, mother said we were going to the cinema. And I found myself the victim of a horror movie…. An unimaginable trauma that I had never managed to talk about, until I found love and wrote In My flesh…. I will never get the incomparable pain out of my head.

So Katoucha, the daughter of the renowned author, playwright and historian Djibril Tamsir Niane, ran away from Guinea to France and would model for Thierry Mugler, Paco Rabanne and Christian Lacroix, and became Yves Saint Laurent’s “muse.” But for Katoucha, modeling was more than personal. In light of the genital mutilation she experienced, modeling was political. It was revenge, she explained, because “I embodied the most arrogant and admired kind of femininity, I who was supposed to be diminished.” But fighting her own battle against genital mutilation was not enough for Katoucha. So in 1994 she stopped modeling and founded KPLCE - Katoucha pour la lutte contre l’excision (Katoucha for the battle against female circumcision) and would visit areas in Africa where the practice still occurred.

So against genital mutilation!